Beyonce - Lemonade

I'm pretty sure I've never thought about what a Beyonce album would sound like, but if I had, I wouldn't have guessed it would sound like this - I wouldn't have expected the diversity, the sharpness of the pop lines, or the consistently high track-by-track quality (nor how much I'd enjoy it, and find replayability in it).

Some of the ones that popped out on the first couple of listens still seem like highlights. In fact, all of the first five songs are pretty super: "Pray You Catch Me", whose neo-soul/r&b reminds me of Jessie Ware; the slowed-down "Hold Up", which leads with a "Maps" (as in Yeah Yeah Yeahs) quote; "Don't Hurt Yourself", which features Jack White and - in its peaks - rages as hard as probably anything he's ever been associated with before; "Sorry" (aka the "you better call Becky with the good hair" one, also aka the one whose outro sounds like Tori Amos); and the best moment on the record, the dramatic "6 Inch" (also notable for using a sample that's extremely familiar to me thanks to Hooverphonic's "2 Wicky" but turns out to actually be from Isaac Hayes's version of "Walk On By"). Also, late-in-the-piece "All Night" is a bit special.

Only Yesterday

This gentle film has a lot going for it in its depiction of a young (but, at 27, no longer so young, and even more so when it was set - in the late 1980s - than today, and probably also more so in Japan than, say, Australia) woman who is joined on her two week holiday in the country by (memories of) her 10 year old self. I think what I liked most, though, is the way that the relationship between her childhood experiences, many of which are at least mildly coloured with regret at possibilities that never came to fruition, and her present day self is never drawn in an overly determined or explicit way. It's subtle, and all the more convincing for the way that subtlety allows the viewer to draw their own lines connecting memory and present.

Also nice is the simplicity with which both the recollections and the present day are presented, creating a nice melding with the - selectively used - sequences in which Taeko's inner imaginings manifest in the world.

(showing as part of the current Ghibli screenings around town)

Maudie

The focus is more on the relationship between Maud and Everett than on Maud's art (Maud Lewis - I hadn't come across her before this film), and it (literally) doesn't pull its punches in that respect. The quiet tone of the film finds a reflection in the austere Nova Scotia setting, the soundtrack is good (composed by Michael Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies and featuring Mary Margaret O'Hara and Lisa Hannigan as well as Margo Timmins, a trio of very beautiful voices and singers), and both Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke are overall rather good - although I felt I could sometimes see Hawke acting. For all of that, I was left a touch underwhelmed - the approach is maybe just a tad too oblique, and the 'what is it about' not sufficiently clear - but still it's a well made piece.

(w/ Erandathie)

"Protest & Persist: Changing Minds" (MWF)

A lot of good sense talked at this one, about how to change people's minds on social (justice) issues. I got quite a bit out of it.

No silver bullets and much acknowledgement of such bullets' non-existence, and a useful - and impressive - balance between pointing out things that are common-places, such as:

• telling stories, 
• thinking about your audience, 
• putting arguments in the language of those you're trying to persuade (e.g. by reference to religious tenets and frameworks), 
• seeking to generate empathy, 
• not relying on facts and data, 
• being aware of language (e.g. 'people seeking asylum' rather than 'asylum seekers' ), and 
• coming at things from different perspectives, and 

building on them with many nuggets of handy techniques, nuances and distinctions, e.g.:

• 'sneaky subversion', 
• being thoughtful about when to alienate and aware that polarisation is something else again, 
• avoiding the trap of putting people into a position where they are the enemy if they don't agree with every single aspect of one's own argument, 
• accepting that it will never be possible to convince everyone, and 
• the extent of individual responsibility to understand and seek to change others' minds.

Panelists Adolfo Aranjuez, Ruby Hamad and Jane Gilmore, with active chairing by Roselina Press.

"Death in the Digital Age" & "Loneliness and Connectivity" (MWF) plus miscellaneous Melbourne things

A day for being glad to be in Melbourne.

"Death in the Digital Age" was Simon Longstaff (who I've come across before in a work context), Elizabeth Tan (because of the brilliant Rubik, of course) and Michael Arnold (Melbourne Uni - history and philosophy of science, a major that was always mysterious to me while I was actually doing an arts degree, but seems in retrospect kind of fascinating). Anyway, pretty interesting and I was taken with the idea of the online service that contacts you every month or so to check whether you're still alive and, if you don't reply, then releases whichever pre-written emails you've prepared (e.g. to tell someone any online passwords that might be useful, but creating the possibility of rather less benign uses); also, the questions about obligations to deal with the reputations and identities of the dead in certain ways. Some talk also of the different types of death - social vs embodied.

I had a couple of hours so grabbed a bite then joined the equal love rally outside the State Library for a while, unsurprisingly running into some nice people I knew there within a few steps; I missed the march (if it went ahead) but it never hurts to add another body in support and it's nice to be en masse on the right side of history. Also in evidence along the way: long queues for all kinds of sub-cultural (and probably consumerist) things including for the games shop Mind Games; preparations for Melbourne Fashion Week; etc. Bumped into Cass and associates between MWF sessions themselves on my way back to ACMI for second session...

... which was "Loneliness and Connectivity" - Elizabeth Tan again and Emily Witt (whose Future Sex felt like it touched me only lightly as I was reading it - a reading which took me a while at that - but which I've found myself thinking about a bit since as some of its implications have sunk in more, so it was enjoyable to see Witt in person). My ears perked up at Tan's dropping of the idea of the 'science-fictionalised present' - for her, a way of getting to the unfamiliar in the everyday. More generally, 'loneliness and connectivity' is certainly a topic with its finger on the zeitgeist, although both writers were a bit equivocal when asked whether they thought there was anything to the ideas that we're currently experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, or that we may have lost the ability to be alone, in solitude (both cracking questions). 

k.d. lang - Recollection

A best-of I think compiled by lang herself, highlighting what a remarkable singer she is as well as reminding me what a monster of a song "Constant Craving" is (fresh off the Augustine 'region of unlikeness' riffs in American Innovations, I recognised a new resonance in that line "maybe a great magnet pulls all souls towards truth...") and how glorious the high points are on Hymns of the 49th Parallel, plus some others that I hadn't heard before including predictably luscious takes on "The Air That I Breathe" and "Crying" (with Roy Orbison).

"Hokusai" (NGV International)

I came for the Prussian blue and wistful impressions of the floating world, I stayed - for three hours, actually running out of time to see the last few sections when the gallery closed - for the much wider palette (colour-literal and emotionally figurative) across this large and wonderful exhibition.

The ones from the 'Thirty-six views of Mt Fuji' were the highlight, each different in perspective and making space for the natural and the human world (the idea of them existing in harmony is a bit of a theme). One of the unexpected delights is the way that Hokusai's eye extends to a sympathetic and often joyful depiction of the people, tiny, who appear in his landscapes, like in this one, showing a group of travellers awed by an enormous tree:

This one, "Reflection in Lake Misaka in Kai Province", is a bit of an outlier in how it explicitly plays with representation, depicting a winter reflection in a summer scene, with the reflection itself off-set from where it ought naturalistically to appear.

The waterfalls weren't quite as dynamic but I did like this one, another that experiments a bit with perspective:

The bridges were also attractive, taking in a wide variety - different types of bridges, close up and more distant. And there's something inherently captivating about a bridge - the span and yearn, the point of passage and transition, and connection.

And my fancy was tickled by the story behind this illustration: a Chinese poet who was sent to Japan to subdue the country with his poetry, meets the Japanese god of poetry disguised as a fisherman, engages in a poetry and dancing contest, and is duly impressed by being told that in Japan the frogs and nightingales also write poetry.

(w/ Yee Fui)

Rivka Galchen - American Innovations

Just finished re-reading American Innovations - a slow and careful read, in part for its many pleasures but also in an attempt to work out what it is that makes it so great, or even just why I like it so much.

I found myself back in the kitchen, still not making spaghetti, and wearing a T-shirt. Not the one I had woken up in, but still a T-shirt that would be best described as pajamas and that I wasn’t feeling too good or masculine or flat-chested in, either. Giotto? It was 11:22 a.m. Making lemon chicken for that man would have been a better way to spend my time, I thought. Or garlic chicken. Whichever. I felt as if there were some important responsibility that I was neglecting so wholly that I couldn’t even admit to myself that it was there. Was I really taking that man’s delivery order so seriously?

Well, I have some ideas on both fronts, but for all of the artfulness that's gone into these stories, I can't help still feeling that there's a fair amount of flat-out magic going on too. Everything is unstable, haunted, and Galchen has so many ways of jolting and destabilising the reader - with an unexpected backhanded observation, a startlingly original and beautiful image or phrase, a left turn from one sentence to another, a weird juxtaposition. Her perspective is somehow sideways of the world, yet also very much intersecting with it.

I had recently heard someone use the word “poleaxed.” That word made me think back to those years in Kentucky as a child—I don’t know why, that was the thought. I was a fancy citified woman now, and so my life could have properly sized disasters, ones in the comedy-of-manners way of things, rather than in the losing-a-limb-to-a-tractor-blade way of things; that was another thought. If there was no blood on the floor, then it wasn’t a tragedy. That was what “urban” meant. Could mean. Poleaxed. I had also once come across a phrase about a book “lying like a poleaxed wildebeest in the middle of my life.” It was my life that was lying in the middle of my life like that, like a poleaxed wildebeest.

I still particularly like the gentle "Wild Berry Blue" and the wilder "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire", as I did last time, and the precise brilliance of "The Lost Order" and the title story also struck me. Everything feels connected in the end, although the connections are rarely straightforwardly metaphorical or anywhere near the surface - they force the reader to fill in the gaps, but within the architecture of tacit associations and meanings that sustain the story as written, which is a lot of their peculiar brilliance, I think.

Eventually—the sun was still high—I walked out to the gyro place. Those bells jangled in a mediocre way when I entered. That soda fountain was there, also the smell of fresh-cut onions. I didn't recognize any of the patrons. I still haven't seen my father again. Nor have I seen Eddy. It's only been twenty-two weeks or so, though. And the other morning I thought there was string cheese in the refrigerator, and then there it was, actually there. Maybe it's wrong of me, but I do hope that nobody buys this building for a long time. I have the sense that ghosts like to return to the same places. I, anyhow, like to do that. And there is something about the bones of this place; it really is easier to dream here.

John Denver - 16 Biggest Hits

John Denver is one of those artists who's always kind of in the air, but he's been especially prominent lately, showing up in critical scenes in Free Fire (twice, including the song that I now know is called "Annie's Song"), Okja ("Annie's Song" again) and, today, Logan Lucky ("Take Me Home, Country Roads", with which I have possibly stronger associations than is really healthy), so it seemed a good time to check out a best of.

The biggest ones are those two, plus "Leaving On A Jet Plane" (which I remember from my childhood, and also from the cast's rendition on Armageddon), but it's all quite nice (the others that maybe I already knew, maybe I didn't, but stick the most sweetly, are "Back Home Again" and "Sunshine On My Shoulders".

Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear

I had to overcome two obstacles to wind up rather liking this: the excessively a.m. radio sound of the instrumentation and arrangements, and my prejudices about 'Father John Misty' himself, who I thought (in no small part due to the beard) was probably one of those irritating hipster bro types aiming to have his cake and eat it (sensitiveness and knowing irony). But in the end, whether or not the second of those in particular is a fair cop, I can forgive a fair bit for genuinely good tunes and there are plenty of them here. So I still feel conflicted, but I also kind of want to keep listening to I Love You, Honeybear.

"Buddha's Smile" & miscellaneous @ NGV International

Lunch break visit today. I liked the "Buddha's Smile" exhibition and learned a bit about the different Buddhas and associated traditions along the way. It runs the gamut from very old to entirely contemporary, sometimes in juxtaposition (but not forcedly). I enjoyed Takashi Murakami's "Daruma the great" (2009) which seemed kind of reverent while also definitely having a sense of humour; also, in very different vein, was a bit fascinated by the little Japanese Zushi (portable Buddhist shrines) and the Tibetan prayer accoutrements (the prayer wheel especially, from 18th/19th century).

Also Tim Johnson's "Imitating Art" (2005), set above a very different type of Buddha piece.

* * *

Other bits and pieces:

• The NGV has been good at installing pieces in the large central ground floor space that are both crowd pleasers and interesting to spend time with, and the current, Michael Lin's "Federation" (2017) is no exception. It brought a smile to my face and I lingered with it.
• The pair of Go Watanabe video projections, "Emo" (2004) and "Landscape" (2006-07), were eye-catching and effective in close-up too. "Landscape" reminded me of the Seventeen Seconds and Faith covers, with its slowly panning and super close-up shot of the face of the animated figure who recites (Japanese) phrases about what she is seeking in a partner in "Emo".
• Wandered through that first room of 20th century international, and along with old favourites like the untitled Rothko red, the blue Soulages, and Michael Andrews' dissolute party scene "All Night Long", was a new (to me) realist painting that was so precise - including its composition - that it has an almost metaphysical (in the general, not specifically the artistic, sense) feel, William Delafield Cook's "An Australian house" (1977).

Logan Lucky

West Virginia NASCAR heist; Stephen Soderbergh; Channing Tatum and Adam Driver (unlikely as brothers; both good), Daniel Craig (bleached blonde - I originally typed that as 'bond' - explosives expert who needs to be broken out of and back into jail to do his part; menacing but never really dangerously and a lot of fun to watch) and sundries (including a small and winsome turn from Katherine Waterston, a slightly larger and maybe equally pleasing one from Hilary Swank, a pretty convincing take on hillbilly womanhood from Katie Holmes, and a very convincing one from Riley Keough, who has been popping up here and there). Moves quickly but never too quickly, and sticks the landing with its ending.

Fumio Sasaki - Goodbye, Things

Subtitle: 'The New Japanese Minimalism'.

I've been noticing a few tendencies towards minimalism in myself for a while now. I'd guess the reasons are a mix of aesthetic (I like the look), ethical (a desire to consume less), practical (less stuff to cart around when I move house!), and psychological (a preference for the sense of space, clarity, and maybe resultant sense of control or freedom?), and it's a mindset shift from the days of collecting as many books, cds and so on as possible, and more generally generating/curating/defaulting to a certain messiness that I probably associated with romantic bohemianism during those impressionable teenage years.

Which makes this book entirely timely and very enjoyable, with sections on 'why minimalism', why we accumulate so much in the first place, tips for saying goodbye to things (eg, 20. Let go of the idea of 'someday', 33. Discard any possessions that you can't discuss with passion, 35. If you can't remember how many presents you've given, don't worry about the gifts you've gotten) and going further along the minimalist journey (eg, 13. The desire to discard and the desire to possess are flip sides of the same coin), and ways that people might change along the way. It's nicely modest in tone[*] and it seems like the author genuinely has gone through the change from 'maximalist' to minimalist and benefited as he describes.

It did inspire me a bit to go even further than I already have in getting rid of possessions, although I suspect I'll run into a lower limit. It's one thing - for example - to have whittled my cd collection from the 1000+ that I previously had done to the most 'essential' 250 or so, but it would be qualitatively different again in terms of a minimalist mindset to actually get rid of all of my cds (though never say never). Clothes would be another frontier for me - I can just about imagine myself with only a skeleton wardrobe ... but it takes a fair bit of imagination at this stage!

* * *

[*] Don't know how much of this is the Japanese voice in translation versus my own projections versus actual thing, but there were the occasional sentences that reminded me of Murakami, eg:

After what I've been through, I think saying goodbye to your things is more than an exercise in tidying up. I think it's an exercise in thinking about true happiness.

Maybe that sounds grandiose. But I seriously think it's true.

"Best MIFF Shorts"

Seven altogether, and - impressively - all good.

Lost Property Office
The Rabbit Hunt
Mrs McCutcheon
The World In Your Window
Let’s See How Fast This Baby Will Go
Fry Day
The Burden

Sentimental favourite for me: "Mrs McCutcheon", in which a ten year old boy who prefers to wear dresses and seems to be tending towards identifying as female becomes friends with another, Indigenous boy rendered an outsider by his skin, done with a sense of drama and style that owes more than a bit to the John Hughes-styled 80s teen film aesthetic and even ends with a school dance.

The one that I suspect will linger: "Fry Day", set on the evening of Ted Bundy's execution and following the 16 year old girl who sets up to take photographs of the crowds who flock to a local public event around the execution and the parallel darker aspects of human nature that she encounters. Maybe "The Rabbit Hunt" too, which is a documentary and has a forcefulness that does feel real. The whimsical existential animated grimness of "The Burden" was also amusing, though maybe a bit thin.

(w/ Kevin)

The Score (Potter Museum)

Variations on the idea of translation between forms, all but a few involving music (I think all of the exceptions instead involved dance). There were a few actual scores as 'punctuation' throughout the exhibition, including some beautiful illustrated Catholic sheets from the 13th, 14th, 15th century and a bunch of 'graphic notation' scores in which composers - including Ligeti - attempted to push beyong traditional notation to represent music in new and different ways.

I suppose it's in the nature of the exhibition's theme that a lot of the pieces were highly conceptual, in their various translations between music and language, colour etc, some of which struck me as interesting in concept but not deep in effect or execution. Exceptions included Danae Valenza's "Phonologies" ("a generic love-letter template ... has been translated and recorded in seven different languages ... These recordings were exposed to spectral analysis and processed as data through a computer program to create musical scores ... The seven tracks that result from this multi staged process of translation are played through a speaker stack that functions like a musical Tower of Babel, the original meaning lost, but in its place a whole host of new refrains") and John Nixon's "Colour-Music Music Composition" (paintings that can be played like a musical score, each element functioning as a cue for musical action - for example, a square is a violin and a triangle is a wine glass).

I also especially liked Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack's mid 20th century wooden 'colour chord stringed sound boxes', relating colour, music and movement - the Bauhaus school, which he attended and where he studied under Kandinsky and Klee, is a definite influence.

(I ran out of time and didn't get to see the top floor properly on this visit.)

Martha Wainwright - Come Home To Mama & Goodnight City

One from 2012, the other from 2016. Neither has really struck me, though I prefer Goodnight City, which leans more into the torchier side of Wainwright's repertoire (Come Home To Mama has a couple of nice moments but is mostly too cacophonous and dissonant, without a balancing payoff, for me).

In This Corner of the World (MIFF)

Anime set in and near Hiroshima during WWII, so no prizes for guessing some of the themes and plot happenings. As it turns out, In This Corner of the World is very nice - the animation is wonderfully painterly, and the overall tone surprisingly poetic as well as attentive to the details of its young protagonist's life and those of the people around her, achieving a smooth blend of the imaginative and the realistic.

(w/ Kevin)

"The Collective - Minnie" (No Vacancy)

Textures and floating crosses (photographs and three or so oil paintings). Kind of dreamy, especially the blue ones.

Jen Cloher - Jen Cloher

One of the two most striking things about this album is how basic it sounds, in the best way: for the most part it's just guitar, voice, drums, with a rock and roll chug and dynamism that reminds me a little of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (it has that same combination of groundedness and space; of electric ring and organic core), and plain lyrics that cut to the quick and seem genuinely to chronicle Cloher's lifestyle and concerns.

The other thing is the record's sheer quality, somehow still coming as something of a pleasant surprise despite how much I've enjoyed Cloher's previous albums (Dead Wood Falls; Hidden Hands; In Blood Memory), not to mention having seen her play live more than once, back in those days when I actually saw live music. There's a whole stack of frankly great songs here - too many to pick favourites, though it was the menacing crunch of "Great Australian Bite" that first drew me in.

Emily Witt - Future Sex

To some degree, the chapter titles tell the story: Expectations, Internet Dating, Orgasmic Meditation, Internet Porn, Live Webcams, Polyamory, Burning Man, Birth Control and Reproduction, and Future Sex. Witt is a sharp observer and, at her best, a terrifically crisp writer, and the insight and nuance that she brings to sketching out the aspects of modern global western well-to-do youngish person-ness with which I'm (very) familiar both helped to orient me and inclined me to trust that her descriptions of contemporarily future-oriented facets and approaches to relationships, desire and sex that in many cases stretch well beyond my - and most people's! - experience were also on point.

The perspective is definitely female, but in a way that's inclusive and open. It's an inherently interesting topic, and her starting - and end - point of questioning the mismatch between the still prevalent assumption that monogamous love is the ultimate aim and the actual dating etc experience of increasing numbers of thirty-somethings today is intriguing; although this is generally more tacit than explicit, she's good on locating her personal reportage in broader social and technological currents.

Robert Poynton - Do Improvise

This was less good than I'd hoped, partly because it's more heavily slanted towards organisational application than in one's personal and creative lives and partly because - for all of the emphasis on improvisation as a practice rather than something that can usefully just be read and thought about - its suggestions seemed rather obvious and general (notice more, let go, use everything; see everything as an offer), even if the orientation they bespeak is no doubt a helpful one. Still, some handy prompts for me, and an easy read. The improv games were my favourite bit - I can see how they would be fun and useful. 

The Party (MIFF)

It was the cast that convinced me to see this one (directed by Sally Potter); Kristin Scott Thomas is at the centre of things (and she is always pretty good), but Emily Mortimer, Cillian Murphy and Patricia Clarkson are all reliably delightful, and the prospect of seeing them all in a satire of modern English mores - in a political context no less (the occasion is a dinner party celebrating Thomas's character's appointment as shadow health minister) - was appealing. And it was fun - a thoroughly minor bagatelle, but a sharp-toothed one that doesn't outstay its welcome (at 71 minutes) and has welcome elements of farce as well as a piggy-backed elegance arising from the choice to shoot in black and white. Clarkson definitely the MVP, all articulately waspish cynicism wrapped around genuine solicitude.

By The Time It Gets Dark (MIFF)

The only thing that the director Anocha Suwichakornpong, who attended this screening, wanted to say to the audience before the film was to maybe not try to make all the pieces fit together, as many people had found the attempt frustrating. Not that her injunction was likely to stop anyone from making the attempt, but certainly going with the flow and attempting to absorb the piece more as a whole, by internalising and intuiting its poetic logic rather than seeking to 'understand' it analytically, was the more rewarding way to engage with what turned out to be a quite visually beautiful, thoughtfully spiritual and interestingly elusive account of historical (1976) and contemporary Thai society as well as the impossibilities of historical and personal-memorial representation, with all kinds of little cul de sacs, reverie-interludes and multi-dimensional layers and ellipses. If perhaps too cryptic for easy summary, it nonetheless satisfied.



(w/ trang)

Brian K Vaughan & Fiona Staples - Saga volumes 1-7

Got on a mini graphic novel kick a few weeks ago and have caught up on where Saga is up to. I have to say that, while in terms of the form, Sandman is far and away my favourite, Saga might be the most joy-inducing.

With a terrific cast of characters who evolve and deepen across the volumes, and with what feels like the right amount of deaths and new additions along the way, it's also (more generally) immensely imaginative in its action and settings, serious-minded in how it takes on its themes (and strongly on the side of right in pushing its messages of tolerance and diversity), and gleeful in its willingness to exploit the comic form as far as possible in service of what it's doing.

There've been plenty of twists and turns so far, including a volume or two's worth of somewhat slowed-down family-building, with the latest volume ending darkly but seemingly with the promise of a swing towards an endgame of sorts. Really good stuff.

(last time: vols 1-3)

Yourself and Yours (MIFF)

Matter-of-factly enigmatic; the lack of resolution about whether there are, in fact, any women apart from Min-jung, and even what it would mean to answer that question, is consistent with the film's overall spirit and perspective on relationships and what makes them work.

Some of the distinctive tone comes from the choice to shoot most of the scenes statically, giving the conversations - nearly all one on one dialogues - ample space and focus, while lending the whole thing a phenomenologically observational feel; it also accentuates the instability introduced by the (at least) two intrusions of imagined encounters between Young-soo and Min-jung. The Korean-ness probably also adds another layer, including in making Min-jung (and/or doppelgangers) impossible to get a fix on. Liked this one a lot, and the director, Hong Sang-soo, seems like one to watch out for.

A River Below (MIFF)

Thought-provoking documentary looking at the events surrounding the making of a video of local fishermen killing and butchering a pink dolphin along the Amazon in Brazil and using its meat to catch the in-demand piracatinga catfish which led to a ban on piracatinga fishing, including the role played by tv celebrity conservationist Richard Rasmussen and the effects on the community involved as well as more widely; there was also a parallel thread about a biologist attempting to raise awareness about the dangerously high mercury levels in another lucrative species of fish that is popular in Colombia.

It made me think about the ethics of activism for social change, and about the wider forces creating the dependencies and necessities leading to this type of resource use and what it means for those who don't have any meaningful choice about how to earn an income to subsist within the systems established by corporate and market drivers.

(w/ Jade, plus Cass was volunteering for this session)

Hostages (MIFF)

All the signifiers were there - especially in fashion and hairstyle, not to mention the Beatles and rock and roll as a subversive force behind the Iron Curtain - and this film worked for me primarily as a period piece, albeit a tense one, as a group of young art school intellectuals attempts to escape Soviet Georgia, 1983, for the west, with bloody results. Based on real events. The scenes highlighting their innocence and naivete add something to it, as does the closing note about the ban on international travel being lifted in 1991, too late for nearly all of the unsuccessful party.

(w/ Hayley)

A Ghost Story OST

Apt; it sounds like I remember from the film.

24 Frames (MIFF)

My first Kiarostami, and his last. Twenty-four 'frames' - presumably so called because the camera is completely still for each - and each 4 1/2 minutes in length. The premise is that each started from a still image - generally a photograph - and the film-maker then imagined what might have happened before or after that image was taken.

Nearly all take animals as their subjects, and while some have little micro-narratives (will the cow get up and walk away before the tide comes in?) in ways that were surely intentional - and, at times, ever so slightly edge towards the sentimentalising, though who can say how much that's my own fault as a viewer in importing anthropocentric readings into the animals' behaviour? - basically not much happens in most of these, calling for a contemplative approach to looking at what's framed on screen, and to absorbing the repeated motifs across the scenes (snow, waves coming into shore, a fence of some kind in the foreground, latticed/hatched windows, a human vehicle passing through the scene in the background).

Most are black and white, some have music - often, amusingly, with a romantic tinge - and while it certainly required attentiveness, I thought it was worth it.

(w/ trang, and also Kevin)

Wild Nothing - Life of Pause

Bland. Unfortunately, they left the melodies at home with this one.

Good Time (MIFF)

Convincingly scuzzy (including Robert Pattinson!) criminality and desperation, accentuated by the graininess and near-constant shooting in close up.

(w/ Julian)

Laura Marling - Once I Was An Eagle

As much as I like the edgily strummy songs that make up about half of Once I Was An Eagle (and most of its front half), I have to admit that I prefer the ones where Marling's guitar is augmented by percussion and other - always understated - touches, as on cuts like the verging-on-tribal "Master Hunter", the more lightly lilting "Where Can I Go?" and "Once" (both brushed by organ), and especially "Pray For Me", its undulations rising and chiming in maybe the record's brightest moment. Anyway, as a whole, this is a very good album, with all kinds of depths.

(I Speak Because I Can)

The World's Greatest Ballads

Number of discs: 3

Number of times I felt I needed to listen all the way through to tell whether I'd like the individual songs: 1 (given the genre)

Number of songs that I now know the name and artist of, having been vaguely familiar with them before: 2 ("Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis and "Wherever You Will Go" by The Calling, both pretty good melodies)

Number of songs I didn't know before but have enjoyed listening to: 5 ("If I Were A Boy" by Beyonce, "Empire State of Mind Pt II" by Alicia Keys, "Red" by Daniel Merriweather, "Everytime" by Britney Spears, "Because" by Jessica Mauboy)

Number of songs that I already knew and unabashedly liked: 8 ("Because of You" by Kelly Clarkson, "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne, "Un-Break My Heart" by Toni Braxton, "Here With Me" by Dido, "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper, "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton, "Buses and Trains" by Bachelor Girl, "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed (although that last seems very out of place))

Number of songs that I already knew and somewhat abashedly liked: 1 ("Drops of Jupiter")

Number of songs for which liking seems almost beside the point, but if it was the point, I would definitely like them (and which are all back to back on this compilation): 3 (the Eric Carmen version of "All By Myself", the Harry Nilsson version of "Without You" and the Jennifer Rush version of "The Power of Love")

The Endless (MIFF)

Strange happenings when two brothers return to what they believe to be a 'UFO death cult' and discover time loops and other repetition as things get distinctly eldritch. It kept me interested but didn't quite nail either the character-driven drama or a consistently spooky mood (it got closer on the latter front).

(w/ Julian)

"The blank page" (mix cd)

A mix of almost entirely instrumental pieces (in the one or two instances when voice appears, Yoko Kanno & The Seatbelts' "Space Lion" and, I think, Julianna Barwick's "Look Into Your Own Mind", it does so more as an instrument amongst others than as the focal point and/or carrier of any intelligible lyrics) with a lean towards ambience and repetition of the kind that seeks emotional impact, spiritual force and transcendence, drawing on contemporary classical (Max Richter, Johann Johannsson, Vladmir Martynov as done by Kronos Quartet), post-rock/shoegaze (Barwick, Stars of the Lid), and miscellaneous eccentrics mostly with a bit of a jazzy streak (Kanno, Boxhead Ensemble, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Ry Cooder & V.M. Bhatt) plus a Richard Strauss song. Pretty much spot on - the type of music that I like, but haven't explored in that much depth, and for which introductions via a sampling rather than full records is probably the best way in.

(from Julian, for writing purposes)

The Big Sick

Thoroughly charming, contemporary and involving, even though I was pretty sure I knew how it was going to end.

(w/ Erandathie)

A Ghost Story

I wondered beforehand whether I might've built this one up too much in anticipation, but I needn't have worried; after all, A Ghost Story is, indeed, all that.

The conceit works, Casey Affleck's white-sheeted ghost never seemingly like a simple metaphor or stand-in for anything in particular, nor (in whatever sense) like it's possessed - haha - of any straightforward subjectivity, but rather inhabiting a kind of in-between space. (Even the language that's most readily available for describing a movie about a ghost is revealing.)

The choice to shoot it in a squareish ratio (4:3) with rounded corners adds to the unmooring effect, while the soundtrack provides some graceful emotional navigational points, both overtly diegetic - especially the use of Dark Rooms' "I Get Overwhelmed", which had already wound its way under my skin from its use in the trailer - and more atmospherically, especially in a film that's very light on for dialogue (except for a jarring extended monologue about the meaninglessness of existence delivered by Will Oldham around midway through ... was he meant to be super annoying maybe?).

I liked the way that the cutting created elisions in time to suggest that the ghost experiences time differently from those alive - a suggestion which makes a different kind of sense come the film's final circle. It also brings even more into focus the long, still shots which, even in their own right, would already have forced a kind of contemplation of the screen in a way that I'm more used to doing with video art than movies - most memorably, the several minutes in which Rooney Mara joylessly eats a pie (possibly thankfully, the shot of paint literally drying is much briefer). And I also liked the little motif of notes left in cracks (or under stones, as the case may be), to pass in time.

So yes, A Ghost Story is very good. I do think that ghosts are having a cultural moment just now and this film really nails many of the best things about that.

Dunkirk

A somewhat different kind of film from Christopher Nolan, albeit still marked by some of his preoccupations - most notably, the passage of time and how it affects action and people.

The focus is intense, and punishing; characters have no back story and little in the way of arcs, and what's on screen feels more like a series of actions than any kind of plot or narrative. It also literally gave me a headache, compounded no doubt by the massive imax format presentation (fully utilised by Nolan so that, disorientingly, the picture was square or even maybe portrait-dimensioned rather than the usual cinematic landscape - put to use throughout, but to especially sheer effect during the aerial combat scenes); the constantly throbbing, occasionally snapping and cracking score didn't help either on that front.

A powerful and, I think, successful film, its use of spectacle in service to the experience of war that it aims to evoke, but I don't think I'd watch it again and it falls into the 'easier to admire than love' category for me.

(w/ Andreas and Adam)

Ghost in the Shell

It may not have been wholly original, but I still enjoyed the way the future city of Ghost in the Shell was visualised. Beyond that, though, unfortunately there wasn't much going on here - doubly disappointing given that several of the key roles were filled by actors capable of plenty (apart from Scarlett, there were also Juliette Binoche, Pilou Asbaek and Takeshi Kitano). Basically uninteresting.